Sun, 31 Oct 2010
Lama Explains Bodhicitta
I gave a talk during this morning's sit at Medicine Buddha Sangha on bodhicitta. I'm going though all the prayers in our prayer book and expaining them and this week's prayer hapened to be the bodhisattva vow. I went back though my notes from Lama Phurbu Tashi's talks and found my notes from a talk on bodhicitta. So here they are:
Bodhicitta in Tibetan is jang chub sem. It means the mind or heart of enlightenment. There are two forms of bodhicitta, conventional and ultimate. Conventional bodhicitta is the aspiration to gain enlightenment for all sentient beings. It is very important and we need to cultivate it from now until we attain enlightenement. However much we cultivate it our practice will be serious and fruitful, and will accumulate merit and eliminate negative emotions. That is why it is important. It is the main highway of the Mahayana. Everything else we employ, virtuous deeds of body, speech and mind are a support for bodhicitta and is related to it.
Ultimate bodhicitta is the wisdom that realizes emptiness. Emptiness is ultimate truth, actual reality, or suchness. Conventional bodhicitta has two categories: aspiration bodhicitta and application bodhicitta.
It is important to recollect the benefits of bodhicitta, it will make you enthusiastic to practice it. Shantideva's book has a very clear explanation of bodhicitta. Every day you should retake the bodhisattva vow. It can be taken without a teacher, by imagining the buddhas and bodhisattvas in front of you in space. Recite the vow three times and think they have blessed you.
Anything can be bodhisattva practice if practiced with bodhicitta motivation. Taking refuge, abandoning the ten non-virtues, meditation, reciting mantras is all bodhisattva practice. Your aspiration to attain enlightenment for all beings makes all practices bodhisattva practice. Even when you are sleeping the merit you have accumulated is compounded. But if you are attached to your merit, that is spiritual materialism. Your merit can be destroyed by anger or strong negative emotions. But if you offer the merit without attachment, it will persist until enlightenment. So every practice has three parts, establishing bodhicitta, the main practice, and dedication.
Fri, 29 Oct 2010
So Long Lama
Lama Phurbu Tashi Rinpoche will be leaving for Indonesia next week. So it's a good time to catch up with what's happened since he came back to Annapolis in March. Last year we lost our meeting location in back of an organic pet food store. One of the group's members, Michael, offered to host the meeting in his house. That continued until he sold his house shortly after Lama returned. Lama has kept his regular Monday noon meetings at the psychologists' office, but the eveneing meetings have been at different places. Some were provate homes and some businesses. It's hard to build a group when you don't have a regular place to meet. We talked about pledging enough money to rent a space, but that hasn't worked out so far. Clearly finding a regular spot for meditation is a top priority for the group. Lama has taught an introductory class on meditation several times. It seemed to be well received, but who knows how many people kept up their meditation.
The other big thing is that Lama started writing essays on different aspects of Buddhism. There are eighteen of them now, enough so he plans to have them printed as a book. You can read the essays on his website. I was asked to proof read and copy edit the essays along with some of his other students. Discussing what he meant to say was cetrainly interesting.
This past year Lama got his driver's license and his green card. He stayed with Gabby for a week and Gabby taught him how to drive a stick shift. We invited Lama up to Baltimore and the Medicine Buddha Sangha to teach his meditation clas and that was a big success. We asked Lama to freee a house of a troubled spirit that had been bothering the daughter of one of our members. That was interesting, because although I had done Chod practice before with Lama, this was the first time I had seen it done in the presence of a spirit.
Lama seems to have had a positive impact on those lucky enough to hear him. And I hope as he travels to Indonesia and (maybe) Tibet, he will have the same impact.
Mon, 25 Oct 2010
The Causes of Enlightenment
One of the books I get inspiration from in my practice is "Mahamudra: Eliminating the Causes of Ignorance". Today I found that Alexander Berzin has done a new translation of the text and placed it online. I thought I'd comment on a section of the text, the four conditions for success in mahamudra practice.
The first condition is cutting off attachment. Just as a hurricane draws its strength from warm ocean waters and rapidly loses strength when over land, the ego draws strength and is sustained by our afflictive emotions. The subtlest and most pervasive emotion is greed. Most people have a hard time even seeing greed as a problem, let alone relinquishing it. Greed is the feeling that we need to endlessly acquire more. It is the endless attempt to fill the cavernous hole which is our ego. When let go of our greed, even for a short while, the truth is much closer. The practice of lojong (mind training) is a very powerful method for overcoming this greed.
Trusting a spiritual teacher is the second condition. The truth cannot be taught, but it can be caught. And having a teacher is the best way to get infected. I meet many new Buddhists on the Internet who ask if they need a teacher. The answer is yes. If you are serious about your practice, you should find a teacher.
Eliminating all bias towards the different schools of BUddhism is the third condition. The truth is beyond conceptual thought. If you cling tightly to one philosophical view and disparage others, you are binding yourself to conceptualization ad it will be hard to see the truth.
Eliminating hope of success or fear of failure in your practice is the fourth condition. The truth is not something over there, it is right here. As long as we put seeing the truth in an imagined future, we will fail to see it here and now.
Fri, 22 Oct 2010
Better Than The Rest
One of the favorite pastimes of Buddhists on the Internet is arguing why their particular tradition is better than the rest. To help out in these arguments, here's a scorecard of the different dimensions that Buddhists can be ranked along.
The first dimension is motivation. There are four motivations one can practice with and they are ranked from the most selfish to the most compasionate. The lowest is to practice for the benefit of this life. Then one can practice for the benefit of your future lives. Or you can practice for the sake of your own liberation from rebirth. Or the highest motivation, which is to practice so that all beings may be liberated. The highest motivation is the Mahayana motivation.
The second dimension is philosophical view. The lowest view is to see the composite as unreal and the indivisible as real. The next higher is to see conceptualized as unreal and immediate perception as real. Still higher is to see the subject-object dicotomy as unreal and their nondual union as real. And the highest is to see all that is dependent as unreal and the emptiness of what is dependent as real. The name for the highest view is the Madhyamika, or Middle Path.
The third dimension is practice. The lower practice is to cultivate the causes of enlightenment, the two accumulations of merit and wisdom. The higher practice is to rely on the result, that is, that the body, speech and mind of the buddha, which are present as potential in all sentient beings. The lowwer practice is sutra practice and the higher is tantra.
So that's the traditional ranking, according to Tibetan Buddhism, and it's no surprise that it comes out the highest according to its own standards. There's another ranking of doctrines in T'ien Tai school of Chinese Buddhism, but I don't know it well enough to describe it.
Sat, 16 Oct 2010
I Don't Know
I once asked the guy who interviewed me at the Space Telescope why he recommended me for the job. He said that when he asked a question, I was the only one who admitted that I didn't know the answer. Everyone else interviewed tried to bullshit him. Admitting you don't know is also important in Buddhism. It's important to have an open mind and the mind that thinks it already knows the answer is not open. Meditation is as much about unlearning as learning, realizing that what you were sure is the truth is nothing more than opinion.
Thu, 14 Oct 2010
Succeeding By Giving Up
A funny thing happened to the small dharma group I'm associated with. After five years of no success attracting new members, new people are showing up. It had gotten to the point that I was about to quit and shut it down. As a last ditch measure I invited Lama Phurbu Tashi to Baltimore, hoping he might draw a few new people. Suddenly a bunch of people showed up, twenty or more for each of his talks. Of course, we promoted it, but we have promoted other teacher visits in the past and never have had a response like this.
There's a mysterious principle at work here, which I call "succeeding by giving up." I've heard more than once of men who have found their true love after they gave up searching for her. It also happens in meditation that you don't find what you're looking for until you give up seeking for it. That has to do with the unfindability of mind. You can't find your mind as if it was your missing keys. Yet that is the way everyone looks for it and it's only when you give up that you see it's been there all along.
Tue, 05 Oct 2010
Misunderstanding Vipassanna
I read a post from a rationalist website talking up the value of vipassanna meditation in the Goenka tradition. The author says that the purpose of meditation is to break the connection between affective judgements (emotions) and mental states. I'm not surprised. Meditation does work, and one of the first effects regular meditators notice is that they gain a certain distance from their emotions. Instead of being totally oblivious to their anger or greed, they watch it while it is happening. Some people like this and others hate it. It does have the advantage that it gives you a chance to prevent your emotions from getting away from you. But this is not the traditional goal of meditation, that goal is enlightenment. People can meditate for whatever reason they please. But the idea of people predisposed to a overly rational, intellectual approach to life using meditation as a kind of spiritual novocaine to numb their emotions is a little dismaying. It's as if they view their emotions as a boisterous puppy that needs to be put on a leash. But the surprising thing is that the distancing between our rational mind and our emotions is based on an illusion. We are holding a leash, but the leash is around our own necks. So it doesn't matter if we hold the leash or not. That is why mahamudra talks of thoughts and emotions emotions as self liberated.
Sun, 03 Oct 2010
Modal Logic and Buddhism
When studying Buddhist philosophy and comparing it to Western philosophy and science, one comes acrss some curious holes. One is that as far as I can tell, Indian logic did not include modal logics, unlike classical Aristotelian logic. Modal logic concerns the use of the terms necessary and possible in propositions. The usual explnation of these terms is that a proposition is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds and possible if it is true in at least one. That possible world need not be our actual world, so a statement can be possibly true but still false. As I said, Indian logic, including Buddhist logic, does not handle these concepts. One reason modal logic is interesting is that the scholastic proofs for the existence of God depend heavily on it. Anselm's argument, the so-called ontological proof, depends on the idea of a necessary being and Aquinas' prime mover, or cosmological proof, depends on every event necessarily having a cause. I do not think these arguments could be made or refuted within Indian philosophy because they lacked modal logic.
Sat, 02 Oct 2010
Kagyu Mongrels
I don't have much to say about the banning of Bardor Tulku, because it isn't my fight. But I want to talk about one of the arguments used to support the ban, that Bardor Tulku is teaching Barom Kagyu and thus should not teach at Kamtsang (Karma) Kagyu centers. A little history. The first Bardor Tulku was a devoted student of Chogyur Lingpa, the great treasure revealer of the 19th century and a treasure revealer in his own right. Both were members of the Barom Kagyu, a sub-school of the Kagyu. But Chogyur Lingpa's sadhanas are widely practiced in the Karma Kagyu. The Vajrakilaya practice I do is by Chogyur Liingpa and has an introductory prayer by the Fifteenth Karmapa. Though each subschool of the Kagyu likes to quote the teachers of its own lineage, they also quote and teach the texts of other Kagyu lineages. I have not seen a text of one Kagyu subschool crticize teachers in other subschools. The idea that there is a pure Karma Kagyu strain of practice and teaching is a silly fiction. It has no relation to actual history or practice.
